Started this blog while searching for an LL.M. thesis subject, succesfully

Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Europeana online again

Many people were curious about the project of digitalization of (hard-copied) works. In fact with 10 million hits an hour, on 20 November 2008, the servers were not capable of providing a fast crawl over the website (1).

Europeana is the online digitalization project funded by the European Union. The project is involved in digitalization of all kinds works of art: text, images, videos and sounds.

But why is this interesting?

Firstly, since all over the world orphan works legislation pops up. And many of those legislative initiative have two things in common:

the copyright holder are not easily be found, and

there has to have been a diligent research.

Of course one can debate about what a diligent research is. But I will not at this point, but at the core of most (provisional) legislation one has to proof, whether for getting a public license, or as a defense before a court, if a diligent research took place.

What many people claim in the upcoming (provisional) U.S. Act is that the law automatically orphans the work of creators and one has to register to get copyright protection (2). And that private registry initiatives (that do not exist yet) are to be set up in order to protect copyrighted works.

This is by the way not really true, since many international copyright treaties will prevent that from going to a registry system, especially article 5(2) Berne Convention (3). As well that only works whereby the copyright holder is not easy to be found and so copyright holder have to become active in preventing their work to become orphans, private initiatives will probably solve this problem.

Secondly, it is interesting to see that a problem arisen from the internet is now tackled by that same medium. As David Sanger mentioned on the SAA Orphan Works Blog(4):

Even the major websites often strip metadata for performance reasons. Whatever the cause, once removed from its context and stripped of identifying data even a properly licensed, well attributed image becomes extremely difficult to trace.(5)

The initiatives mentioned by the Lisa Shaftel of the Graphic Artists Guild is to prevent works from being orphaned, could be helpfull:

register your works with the US Copyright Office.

be sure to put you name and date of creation somewhere on all your works legibly.

keep copies of your copyright registrations with hard copy prints of the works.

tell your heir(s)- the person or people you will name in your will or living trust- about your works and show them where your paper files are.

write a will or living trust.(6)

Initiatives like Europeana, or in general the digitalization of all kinds of works, are most likely resulting in less orphaned works. When the aforementioned diligent search does not involve databases like these, it is most unlikely that it is considered to be diligent before a copyright board or before court.So initiatives like these have to be supported in order to prevent the problem we are facing, and eventually the problem that a digital environment created is being transferred into a progressive solution in that same environment. Since even the hardcopied world is being covered by the databases.